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Mark Steyn

What is the future of conservatism?

As his post-mortem observations to donors confirmed, Romney’s leaked “47 percent” aside is indicative of the way he thinks, and not a small thing. Indeed, it’s a betrayal of core conservative morality: from “Teach a man to fish” to “There’s no point even bothering to try to teach 47 percent to fish.” I was born a subject of Her Canadian Majesty and, even in a parliamentary system, it would not be regarded as healthy for the Queen’s Prime Minister to think like this. In a republic in which the head of government is also head of state, it’s simply unbecoming. The next guy has to be running as president of all Americans, even the deadbeats.

That means an end to the consultant-driven, small-ball model of Republican strategy. The Democrats used their brutal Romney-gives-you-cancer/ Ryan-offs-your-granny advertising in Ohio as bad cop to the good cop of Obama’s cultural cool. The trouble for conservatives is we have no good cop. That’s to say, we have no positive presence in the broader cultural space where real people actually live. We have all the talk-radio shows and cable networks we need, and the rest of the country is happy to leave us walled up in those redoubts. But culture trumps politics, and not just in the movies and pop songs, grade schools and mainline churches, but increasingly in the boardrooms, too. Instead of giving your hard-earned dollars to help drag some finger-in-the-windy squish with an R after his name over the finish line every other November, conservatives need to start fighting on the turf that matters. We risk winding up like the Shakers–dependent on conversion while eschewing all effective means thereof.

And finally please don’t waste another four years obsessing over whether Barack Obama is a secret Muslim Kenyan Commie or whatever. He may be all those things, but the lesson of November 6 is that a majority of the American people agree with him. He’s not the exotic other, he’s all too typical. That’s the problem.

This. A thousand times this. Heck, a large percentage of Republicans agree with him.

For the 1,456,632,099,869,184th time, Romney is not conservative in any way shape or form. He never was, he is not now and he is likely to never be conservative. It just is not in his genetic code to be such.

Maybe stop going ape-sh!t puritanical on the more conservative contenders in the primary? The way the Palinistas mercilessly attacked Perry and Cain was disappointing, to say the least. Then she didn’t even run. And don’t get me started with the no-amnesty-under-any-condition crowd who smells amnesty behind every rock. Perry’s program for the children of illegals in Texas was an immediate deal-breaker for them.

Liberals won the culture war because the mere thought of conservatism existing hurls them into a hysterical emotional storm of rage and confusion, so conservatives tend to lay low when there are liberals around to avoid the tantrums and histrionics.

It’s so sad that they won because they were so insufferable that everybody left them alone to stew collectively in their own unopposed sense of self-awesomeness, and having convinced themselves how amazing they were, others started to think that maybe there was something to warrant this high personal opinion.